IDEAS TO LIVE BY from www.theschooloflife.com

Religion

September 16, 2011

"It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." - Ben Okri

As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, becoming something we take for granted as our very reality - a governing pattern that the culture obeys, a nearly-invisible framework that structures our lives and narrows our diversity, creating a monoculture.

A monoculture doesn't mean that we all believe exactly the same thing or act in exactly the same way, but that we share key beliefs and assumptions about how the world works and what our lives ought to look like. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the master story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist — or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how.

Monocultures rise and fall with the times. In sixteenth-century Europe, the monoculture centred on religion and superstition (think of Galileo being accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the solar system). Roughly a hundred years later, the master story was about the discoverability of the world through science, machines and mathematics.

Now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the monoculture is economic. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world are changing - or have already changed - in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. How you think about your work, your relationships with others and with the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn't just changing your mind - it's changing your life.

May 18, 2010

You Are Not A Gadget, the new book by Silicon Valley luminary Jaron Lanieris, he says, fundamentally a book about spirituality. He is at pains to stress that humans are not machines, though the digital revolution has developed the habit of assuming we are. So, he advises, "We should assume supernatural specialness to people." Supernatural? Specialness? Spirituality? It seems misplaced language for the man who coined the term "virtual reality" and is routinely included on lists of leading public intellectuals. Is it anything more than West Coast hippie-speak?

Lanier's central complaint can be stated in more humdrum terms: software design is, for the most part, dehumanising. Think of websites like this one. They routinely play host to trolls, individuals who post abuse behind veils of anonymity. Lanier believes the problem is not anonymity per se, which is sometimes necessary to protect people, but transient anonymity, which removes the personal consequences of posting. He does not mean that people should be fined for, say, threatening an airport with destruction. He means that anonymous posters collude with a web 2.0 culture that doesn't treat people as people, but as the mindless generators of fragments of stuff.

"Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger," he advises, because you dehumanise yourself too. And it must be a principled stance you take. Everyone has an "inner troll". No-one, given the right circumstances, can otherwise resist the pleasures of "drive-by anonymity". It's a serious issue, he believes. Two factors came together to allow the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany: economic humiliation and adherence to a collectivist ideology. "We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it's entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shocks in the coming decades."

Indeed, the new ideology is already entrenched. Web 2.0 culture is embedded in the most celebrated internet phenomena of our times: Open source, Wikipedia, Facebook. Wikipedia, for example, aims to be a single book containing all knowledge. It lacks the context that informs reader discernment, and the authorship that informs reader trust. Compare that with a lesson of history: societies that follow a single book are totalitarian. "Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available." Our civilisation is built on libraries and authors, not portals and fragments. Web 2.0 puts both of the former under threat.

Or consider Facebook. It segments people: you're defined by your relationship status, gender, age, location and so on. More importantly still, you have no option other than to present yourself in ways the interface allows. Again, that's dehumanising. You are locked-in by the design – and this is a site used by 40% of all internet users, and counting.

At base, what Lanier believes technologists distrust are notions of quality, of meaning, of mystery. They believe the reductionist models of consciousness that sees the brain as a computer. This has two consequences. First, it interprets experience is the processing of bits, which means "you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded onto a computer." Second, it treats people as computers too, who will one day be ousted by superior computers. "The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience."

Individuals like Larry Page, one of Google's founders, expect the internet to come alive quite soon, Lanier reports. (Google's website already says it was "brought … to life in September 1998.") Such personal details could be ignored as eccentricities, except that the people who hold them wield power. Their missionary preference for machinism over humanism is imposing limits on the world in which we live. "If a church or a government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive."

He's no Luddite. Rather, "Enlightened designers leave open the possibility either of metaphysical specialness in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren't explained by ideas like evolution that we already believe we can capture in software systems." So, he prefers a mysterious view of life over a materialist one, not out of any prior metaphysical conviction, but simply because it works – works in terms of enlarging, not restricting, our humanity. It's a pragmatic advocacy of a religious attitude to life, and no doubt shaped by his Californian context. But it's a strikingly religious attitude, no less.

Mark Vernon is a member of The School Of Life faculty. His new book, The Meaning of Friendship, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

You Are Not a Gadget is available for purchase in The School of Life shop.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian's Comment Is Free website.

November 13, 2009

Is sexual liberation over? You may think so, reading Jealousy, the sequel to The Sexual Life of Catherine M. In it, lusty Parisian academic Catherine Millet, who hung out with the whores in the Bois de Boulogne, reveals something controversial: a heart. When her man slept around, she went barmy.

Hypocrisy is the most logical attitude to infidelity, as it fuses many issues, and beliefs about it formed in a world very different to our own. It has a religious dimension. As an infidel betrays God, so infidelity betrays the faith between two people. The assumption is that loyalty in body, mind and spirit are interchangeable. But arguably, people began disapproving of infidelity for a more practical reasons, to stop rows about property.

Avid debauchee Alexandre ‘Three Musketeers’ Dumas lamented, ‘Why is what was called cuckoldry in the seventeenth century called adultery in the nineteenth?’ His answer was inheritance law. Once, first-born sons got it all, then the law changed, giving every child a portion of the estate. So husbands who once worried only about the paternity of their heir grew to fear every cuckoo in the nest. And society grew fiercer about female infidelity, while in men a mistress remained a badge of success.

Female sluts got it in the neck since Eve bit the apple. Katie Price is slated for cavorting with her cage fighter. But male sluts are less tolerated than before. The court of public opinion is still out on randy Ashley Cole, while Cheryl is a latter-day saint for fighting for her love. But for those whose private lives are private, now we have DNA-testing, good contraception, fidelity seems less relevant. With the internet and the liar's friend, the mobile phone, slipping the marital leash is ever easier. Why can't we act on passing fancies without breaching emotional loyalty?

I understand infidelity’s fans. Yet I believe monogamy, with the right person, is the least-worst path through life. Even empty sex threatens a relationship, as nobody can guarantee it will not come to mean more. This belief is less old-fashioned than imagining that mind rules body, like 17th-century rationalist, René Descartes. On the contrary, scientists have found neurochemicals released in sex, vasopressin and oxytocin, mean that where lust leads, territorial feelings often follow. Love and sex, mind and body, are as interchangeable as ever.

February 24, 2009

Philosopher Nigel Warburton will be wading through the thickets of censorship, hate speech, offensiveness and human rights this Friday at The School of Life. Find out more about the event and about Nigel's new book on Free Speech here.

Nigel has also created an invaluable web resource of podcasts, articles and links around the topic. Listen to his contribution to the new Thought for the Worldseries, in which we argues with reference to the Geert Wilders case, that offensive views can have an unexpectedly beneficial side-effects.

February 12, 2009

There's a battle underway for control of BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot. At present, you have to show religious affiliation to win your two minutes of fame. Secular humanists argue that you don't have to be religious to have offer a life-improving suggestion, a point that seems perfectly obvious to us at The School of Life.

So the humanists have launched a rival series of thoughts to make their point. I've listened to some, and they're certainly listenable to - though rather focused on critique and moral issues, as opposed to the fuller, life enhancing moments that the best thoughts can offer.

July 26, 2008

David Spero's new book Churches is my favourite photography book of the year. It documents an array of buildings currently used as churches, none of which was built for the purpose. Often temporary, semi-permanent or unconsecrated, the buildings are located where we would least expect to find them, in industrial estates, shopping parades, houses, garages, cinemas, above pubs and commercial properties. Spero finds a spirit (whether Holy or not is up to us) in the most unlikely places and even for a non-believer like me, there is something very moving about the places in which people can manage to find meaning. What really comes across is a sense of striving for spaces of community and support in the face of the displacements caused by modern urban existence. We're stocking the book in The School of Life on on our shelf 'for those with a God-shaped hole'.